Saturday, October 25, 2008

This last week I wrote about Healthcare for America Now (HCAN) and its campaign for a much better health care plan for America.

I have since been informed by reader, Doug Rogers that HCAN—sponsored by Barack Obama and ignored by John McCain—does not actually meet many of poorer America’s needs. Moreover, it seems to be a plan to make more money for the current health care insurance and industry players. As far as I can tell both Cynthia McKinney (Greens) and Ralph Nader are supporting much better single-payer plans.

Perhaps this is why in Missouri the alternative parties are doing so well.

The following is exactly what Doug Rogers conveyed to me.

HCAN—PROPAGANDA?

HCAN is not single-payer.

No, it is not a single payer plan. The original bill that was introduced by John Conyers is called Healthcare Now. It is a single-payer plan. It is backed by Dennis Kucinich and presidential candidates Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney. This other initiative, which is called Healthcare for America Now or HCAN(confusing right?) is backed by the mainstream Democrats, MoveOn.org (I cancelled my membership because of it), Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It is well-funded and is getting a huge push right now and threatens to swamp the single-payer initiative.

I don't know who the unseen players are in its promotion. But the thing you have to ask yourself is why would anyone go into a negotiation asking for less than what they wanted? If you had an agent negotiating the sale of your house and you were hoping to get $200,000 for it, but the agent offered it for $180,000 and then told you he ended up settling for $150,000, what conclusions would you draw? Either that he is totally incompetent or that he was getting something on the side from the other party in the negotiation.

That is the situation we have with the Democrats right now. Obama is receiving massive contributions from the health insurance industry, so it’s not hard to get the picture.

Please check this out and let as many people as you can know what's really going on. This is our last and best opportunity to reform healthcare and if the insurance companies can kill it it will be a generation before we get another opportunity.

MOREOVER

Moreover, Doug Rogers had written earlier on this topic:

HCAN is not your friend.

Unfortunately HCAN is a decoy to once again kill healthcare reform in this country. Obama's plan is essentially Clinton's plan. She found that the insurance lobby was so powerful that the best approach was to just give them what they want. So the Obama/Clinton/HCAN plan is to leave the private health insurance industry in control, allowing them to keep insuring the healthiest and wealthiest people and reaping the profits of that, while the poor and sick would become the burden of the U.S. Treasury.

So just like in the Medicare reform that the Republicans passed, we will have to incentivize coverage for the unprofitable- that is give taxpayer dollars over to the insurance industry at whatever level they decide is adequate. The problem is the Treasury is about to go bankrupt with the multiple corporate scams that siphon tax dollars into private hands. So it will be easy for conservatives to say there's not enough money to help poor people and the whole thing will crash once again.

The only plan that will actually reduce what we spend on health care, which is really our only option, is single payer. That is Medicare for all, private delivery but publicly financed. We need many more people to say no to HCAN and yes to the Healthcare Now initiative (you can see how they even co-opted the name to confuse people). A strong counter-mandate to Obama's pro-corporate agenda by voting for a single-payer third party candidate is imperative.